On 21 September 2026, a technical fault with air traffic control at Nats’ Prestwick Centre in South Ayrshire, Scotland, was resolved, but flight delays and cancellations continued across UK airports.
Delays and Cancellations Affect Multiple Airports
Flight disruptions were reported at Glasgow, Prestwick, Edinburgh, Manchester, Newcastle, Belfast City, Dundee, Benbecula, and East Midlands airports. Manchester Airports Group confirmed delays of up to one hour at Manchester Airport and delays also affected East Midlands Airport. Several arrivals and departures at Belfast City Airport were cancelled, including flights on routes to and from Manchester, Amsterdam, London City, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. Edinburgh Airport reported ongoing delays related to the
Prestwick Centre issue, and flights at Dundee and Benbecula airports faced schedule impacts.
AGS, operator of Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Southampton airports, cited delays primarily at Glasgow with expected further disruption across their network. Highlands and Islands Airports confirmed flight schedule effects across their 11 regional airports. Passengers at Glasgow, Prestwick, and Edinburgh airports reported delays on social media, with some experiencing extended waits on planes at Glasgow. Ryanair stated the equipment failure at Nats affected airspace over Scotland and northern England, impacting flights to and from the UK and Ireland. Ryanair reported its 140 flights and approximately 25,000 passengers were
affected by the issue.
Official Responses and Airline Reactions
Nats confirmed their engineers had fixed the technical problem and were working with airlines and airports to safely lift air traffic regulations and reduce further disruption. A Nats spokesperson said, “The issue in our Prestwick centre is now fixed. We are working with airports and airlines to safely lift air traffic regulations as quickly as we can to minimise any further disruption.” They added that airports south of Manchester were broadly unaffected, but flights heading north and departing Scottish airports remained delayed.
UK Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander described the situation as “deeply frustrating for passengers after
the previous issue.” Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney committed to engaging with Nats to ensure air traffic control systems maintain necessary resilience.
Ryanair’s Chief Operations Officer Neal McMahon criticized Nats’ repeated failures, stating, “Just three days after Nats assured airlines and passengers that it had introduced robust ‘mitigation plans’, its flight data processing system has failed again.” He called for the resignation of Nats CEO Martin Rolfe, whose report had claimed further failures were unlikely.
Jet2 Chief Executive Steve Heapy said, “Once again, airlines and customers are being disrupted by yet another Nats issue,” calling the situation unacceptable. British Airways
expressed disappointment that customers faced disruption following another technical fault with Nats. Nats CEO Martin Rolfe declined to resign, describing the prior software defect as “very, very obscure.”
Background and Ongoing Challenges for UK Air Traffic Control
The Prestwick Centre handles air traffic control for Scotland and northern England. The equipment failure that caused the disruption on 21 September is unrelated to a separate software defect that led to the cancellation of 2,000 flights across the UK earlier in the month. Nats published an initial report on the earlier defect on 8 September 2026.
This recent incident marks the fourth major national air traffic control disruption in three years.
Previous events include a computer shutdown during the 2023 August bank holiday weekend that affected 700,000 passengers, and a smaller outage in 2025 causing 150 cancellations. Nats manages about 2.5 million flights annually but continues to face challenges maintaining reliability across its systems.
